A TEST OF PURITY

Back in the day, there used to be a commercial that proclaimed that Ivory soap was about 99 and a half percent “pure.” (The other half of one percent was presumably alien DNA.) That commercial rang a bell in my mind as I watched the fiasco of the proposed Republican legislation in Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare go down in flames last week. It seems that for a hardcore of about 30 looney-tunes GOP right wing representatives in the House that call themselves the “Freedom Caucus,” the replace part of the proposed bill was still far too generous. Why some poor soul, somewhere in the country, who was desperately sick and couldn’t afford health insurance, might actually receive a bit of medical treatment on the government’s dime under the Republican plan. Can’t have that. How does that kind of scenario benefit the rich? So, despite extensive lobbying by Trump and his consiglieri’s, this hardcore band of 30 right-wing whackos would not budge in their opposition to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposed bill because it still contained some minimal benefits to assist the unfortunate. Only total repeal would meet their objections. In the end, Ryan had to pull the bill off the House floor in order to avoid an embarrassing defeat. Obamacare, as muddled as it is, still remains in place.

First a few rather obvious observations. Trump, who, essentially believes in nothing but the enhancement of his own ego, couldn’t care less about the details of the proposed legislation. During the recently concluded campaign, at one point he promised “health care for everyone.” That promise quickly dissolved with the morning mist as Republican insiders and contributors to his campaign reminded him that such action sounded an awful lot like universal health care, which has been a Democrat initiative over many decades. So Trump, in the end, was willing to settle for repealing Obamacare, which he had described as “absolutely horrible,” and perhaps replacing it with some inexpensive token gesture. Ryan and his Republican cohorts would have gone along with that, but the problem was, that there is also about 30 so-called “moderate” Republicans from competitive districts who would have faced daunting re-election prospects in 2018 if the Republican plan didn’t contain at least some substance in the replace part of “repeal and replace.” In the end, the two Republican factions could not reconcile their differences, and legislative disaster loomed ahead like the massive iceberg appearing before the Titanic.

Make no mistake- the Ryan plan was still all about removing the poor from government health care subsidies. About 20 million previously uninsured poor have been allowed to sign up for Medicaid in 31 states since Obamacare took hold. (The other 19 states, all hardcore Republican in the South and Mid-West, essentially gave the middle-finger to those unable to afford health insurance. Their philosophy is that if you’re too poor to afford to be covered, and you become seriously ill, just quietly curl up in a ball somewhere and die. But please don’t bother us good, God-fearing folk that can afford insurance.) In any event, the Ryan plan would have put the kibosh on any further expansion of Medicaid, even in states willing to do so, and slowly begin whittling down the number of newer enrollments. There would have been a total reduction in government health care subsidies to the poor, along with a reduction of taxes on the rich. Hey, one needs to get his or her priorities in proper sequence. But even these cut backs were not enough for the so-called “Freedom Caucus” who still feared that someone somewhere would be receiving a government handout.

As I discussed in a recent piece, the only legislation that would provide universal health care to all would be a single payer system run by the government. Every civilized country in the world provides its citizens with such blanket coverage. Even tyrannical, despotic governments such as Cuba or N.Korea provide universal health care. In France, its system is so extensive that a nurse comes to a woman’s house for up to five days after she’s given birth to a newborn child. Yet, somehow, we can’t afford that level of coverage for all Americans. Many years ago, I personally knew a man that moved to Canada so as to take advantage of its state provided medical system. Although he was only middle-aged, he had a number of serious life-threatening, health-related issues, and could not afford insurance or related doctor’s bills. In Canada, at that time, one had to be a resident for 18 months before they qualified for the state-sponsered system. He sweated it out for 18 months, receiving barely minimal medical treatments for his conditions, that he could hardly pay for; but he did survive and was finally able to receive the necessary care for his ailments, free of charge. Under whose moral value code is it necessary for an American to move to Canada in order to attempt to save his life.

I lay the blame for opposition to something as sane and rational as universal health care in this country, to the poison that’s been pouring out of electronic media for the last 30 years, by crypto-fascists such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and a host of other, similar, far right, looney-tooners. Americans have been sold a bill of goods over the last 30 years that everything that’s governmentally sponsored is inherently evil. It wasn’t always thus. In the 1970s, Republican president Richard Nixon proposed a form of universal health care to Congress, and that time it was the Democrats that fucked it all up because they felt it wasn’t extensive enough. So much for politics in this country.

In any event, a band of Republican far right-wingers in the House was enough to sink a very bad piece of legislation to begin with, and deprive Trump of the victory his ego so voraciously craved. The bill just wasn’t pure enough for the “Freedom Caucus” to support. It certainly wasn’t as pure as Ivory soap.